The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

I’m not naive, I know a ton of huge enterprises still run huge fleets of windows “servers” but I still find it hilarious that a supposedly serious server OS would default to showing you the weather and ads in the start menu.

I switched a couple months ago. This is my third time trying to switch to desktop Linux, and things are very different this time.

I installed CachyOS and all of my hardware just worked, including NVIDIA/Wayland. No real bugs beyond incorrect monitor positioning, and some tinkering needed for Diablo 4/Battle.net.

The Diablo 4 issue is present on Windows as well, and ironically, there isn't a fix on Windows for those affected. On Linux, a DXVK config change solves the bug.

Not really missing anything.

CreateProcessA() on Windows is very slow. A significant portion of the perceived speedup for development tasks is that fork() takes on the order of microseconds, but creating a Windows process takes ~50ms, sometimes several times that if DEP is enabled. This is VERY painful if you try to use fork-based multiprocessing programs directly.

I run mint as well and really love it's esthetic. I prefer AMD GPUs on Linux and they have always "just worked".

I know how to use the terminal to enforce deep sleep on laptops, but thats about all I do setup wise.

> React based start menu with visible lag

That surprised me. But seems not true? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124688

I never understood why file search is SOOO bad on windows (mac too). Its so damn slow and even feature wise I never figured out why it was so difficult to just search for files in this directory

> file Explorer (buggily) parsing files to display metadata before listing them

It's crazy, open a directory full of .mp4s and sometimes the list briefly appears but then it goes completely blank, just to start listing them again one-by-one taking about one second per entry, while being unresponsive to input.

I did the same, I had jumped into POP OS instead, which is also Ubuntu based, then a year back I got into EndeavourOS an Arch based distro, and have not looked back since. I use it on everything I can put Linux on.

> I installed Linux Mint. While it didn't just work (TM), and I had to go into recovery mode to install Nvidia drivers, it worked well enough.

Mint is seriously going to sabotage the momentum Linux is having right now.

Out of curiosity, why are such high fps numbers desirable? Maybe I don't understand how displays work, but how does having fps > refresh rate work? Aren't many of those frames just wasted?

An aside based on what you have mentioned. What the heck happened to Windows file manager? I mean it used to be that Windows was rock solid while Linux variants had various parsing performance/stability issues. Now it feels like it is the complete opposite.

In Win 11 I am constantly finding the whole explorer locking up just copying files via USB because of reasons unknown. Where as on my Linux machines, I have absolute faith that it will just handle it or at the very least not just stop spinning in the background in zombie land, not dead enough to die but not alive enough to do anything. Windows is in a very unfortunate place right now, I do hope they will wake up and try to get things back on the road but I am very doubtful considering the leader ship they have nowadays.

Does anybody have security concerns about running games with Proton/Wine? Games already have a massive attack surface and I can imagine there are some nasty bugs lurking in the compat layer that would enable RCEs not possible on Windows. This is kind of holding me back from making the jump.

You might like XFCE which to me is basically windows XP. It’s available in Debian install or as Xubuntu.

People oversell how much windows just works. It only does so because it comes pre installed. I regularly reinstall my wife's and it's always more of a pain in the ass than Linux.

Can I transfer my Overwatch battlenet account to steam? I really want to jump ship too.

How is Proton with nVidia drivers? I have a 3080.

Those are the last 2 issues keeping my home desktop on windows-land

Does HDR work though?

me just realizing that React start menu thing I saw last week was not a joke… o.O

[dead]

The unfortunate reality is that, depending on your personal preferences, "most modern games" require such a ring 0 anti-cheat. Any game that has a matchmaking mode with a competitive option requires a rootkit.

As an aside, I recently found Riot Games' Vanguard installed on my Linux ESP partition... after having installed the game on my windows partition. It rooted every OS it could find mounted. Incredible.

The other day I tried Midtown madness, something that has become a bit of an issue to run on Windows. It took less than a minute to install and booted first time via Wine. It is amazing seeing just how well it works and feels almost like a native binary.

When I was younger I also was like that.

As I got older, my interests in games decreased. That and also because I am too dumb to make wine work with games nowadays; it was easier in the 32bit era. :\

But the real problem is lack of time. There are so many things to do and so little time. Today's games are also not as interesting IMO. Most of them are just "who has the better 3D engine".

I am having 20 fps more in Linux with 4k screen when compared to 2k in Windows. Didn’t believe my old GPU could get better over time.

There's no game that I want to play badly enough to put up with DRM on consoles or rootkits (anti-chest) and DRM (windows) on my computer

This has been my experience as well.

I don't play a ton of modern games, but my wife and I played through the HD remakes of Myst and Riven, released in 2021 and 2024 respectively. I didn't even look at the Proton compatibility before buying the games because for single-player stuff then Proton has gotten so good that I almost never have to worry about it. I don't really play multiplayer games (outside of the original Doom or Minecraft with a friend or my wife, both of which have native Linux clients), so there hasn't ever been an issue for me.

My gaming box is a NixOS JovianOS thing, and I even get very good results using the official Microsoft adapter for Xbox One controllers. I really feel no desire to go back to Windows at this point.

Meanwhile nothing epic will work on mint (at least I can’t get them working), there are frequently broken components of games (eg. phasmophobia mic won’t work), most multiplayer stuff with anti-cheat won’t work.

Whenever I see someone say “most modern games work flawlessly” I know they’re full of shit or just don’t do much gaming.

Don't get me wrong, I’m not going back to windows, but it’s not the panacea that people pretend it is. Often enough it doesn’t “just work” and you have to hunt down some additional command line args to get games to run.

The majority of popular PvP shooters use anti-cheat which does not work on Proton, so "almost all modern games" seems like overselling it to me.

But the stuff that does work, works well. I play Helldivers 2 via Proton on Fedora, and i experience far fewer crashes and instances of weird behaviour than friends on Windows or Xbox.

You’re being practical, but papering over the archaic terminal interface by automating it with LLMs is basically a dystopia. Technologists should fundamentally innovate terminals instead, such that the CLI is friendly even towards newcomers.

Sure, LLMs may save you time but you will learn less. It seems that you even recognize this problem.

You don't really have to use it. Not for most of the things that a typical desktop user would need to do. It helps though.

Windows coasted on decades of entrenched users from two sources: games and Microsoft Office.

Google docs demolished one of those.

Arch + Claude Code has been working amazingly well for me. I tried switching from Windows in the past and it never clicked. Now it's been great.

two sentence horror

The problem is still the desktop itself. Basically none of the existing Linux desktop components are mature, either design or technical wise and more often than not, both.

Deck works because most games are self contained, allowing them to have a default game mode that bypasses the desktop entirely.

I think that comes with risks, they will need to do a lot of work to manage expectations which is likely to be an unending uphill battle getting users to read and absorb any notice you put in front of them. If there's ever an official version of SteamOS that installs as broadly as most other linux distros along with a general/minimally trained audience, they can't do Deck certified on how well each game works on your system, and I can see challenges for "why does this game I bought on the steam store not work on my steam system?" especially if it's the hot new multiplayer game that targets windows with windows-only anticheat.

PC does have a fair amount of users that want it to operate in a console-like way when it comes to usability, the moment you tell them to fiddle with a runtime or experiment with the command line variables you lose them. That's to say nothing about handling stuff that lives outside steam, because PC gaming shouldn't equal Valve. The Deck is a nice manageable subset to deal with and fairly small enthusiast audience

Valve, the monopolist, should not have more control over the Linux ecosystem.

I'm totally on board with a gaming-focused distro from Valve. I'll switch the second they get proper Nvidia GPU support. So far, no luck with that.

Fortnite might be a battle worth choosing. I wouldn't want to carve my children's gray matter into grooves of cosmetic microtransactions of psychological warfare.

We've been playing Fortnite by "streaming" from xbox cloud gaming (for free) over the last couple of months. For the most part it's worked great. Sessions are limited to one hour, resolution is relatively low, and depending on the day/time... there can be more than a little input lag.

But this truly was the one game my kids couldn't play from Linux that they wanted to.

Amazon prime gaming and GeForce Now also allow linking epic accounts to stream games. I've read GeForce now offers a free, somewhat limited tier as well... but we haven't tried it yet.

Is strange using a game streaming service from proper Linux-only gaming rigs... but I think that’s the only real option right now. :)

Fortnite is a problem because of kernel level anti-cheat, trying to get it work on Proton....will probably be a long time.

The solution is: buy a Playstation.

This really sucks... Fortnite is a must-have for many people (myself included).

The problem is DRM, so there is no good answer.

> 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.

If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:

1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.

2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.

27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?

That is incredible! If you had asked me I would have guessed at least 80% were from Steam OS handhelds.

They do now: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/06/steam-update-brings-ac...

I just wish they had to toggle to use proton by default for all games, regardless of if a Linux version exists. There have been several games where I ended up with the buggy abandoned Linux version (Rocket League is a particularly egregious example of this) instead of the much better supported Windows + Proton version.

I've only ever needed to enable Proton for non-Steam games. Are there Steam games that don't have Proton enabled and need it to be manually enabled by the user? (I've only used it on the Steam Deck)

They do

Reliable Anticheat rootkits are just not possible on Open PC platforms. Consoles should just add proper keyboard+mouse support and competitive online players can move over...

I really wish there was an (k)Ubuntu-like Linux distro - apt-based, semi-annual updates, kde default or selectable - but without all the stupid Ubuntu-isms like snap and alpha quality rust coreutils and whatnot. I run Gentoo and Debian for myself, but I'd like something normie-friendly I can put on other peoples machines and not get a ton of support questions.

Consoles also bring a lot of headache when it comes to modding, though.

Just want to say that a decade ago Warframe was the first game I ever played on WINE when I was first learning Linux in school. If it hadn't been so friendly and easy to keep playing I wouldn't have the skills and job I do today. Thank you!

Cool! I have fond memories of playing Warframe on Linux with my 1050ti ~5 years ago.

Kudos to the team for keeping us in the loop, I apologize for the strange crashlogs my OOM killer sent.

I’ll never forget a rep from Warframe joined the teamspeak server I was in for a Planetside 2 group back in 2012 to pitch us on playing the game. :)

The anti-cheat creators other than Valve aren't bothered to invest into making a Linux kernel anti-cheat, and most Linux users would be unwilling to allow one to be installed either.

Totally agree, but it seems like competitive games have solved it. CS2 (VAC), The Finals (EAC), and Overwatch 2 (Warden) all run flawlessly on Linux.

The only sure-fire way to defeat cheats is with something like Counter Strike's overwatch system: have humans vet replays. Cheats are a ludicrous business, there is simply far too much incentive to defeat software-based systems.

>No idea what it would look like though.

It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.

Well, the beauty of Linux is that anyone can go implement whatever features they want. But, I’m very happy that folks aren’t very interested in supporting this kernel level DRM stuff.

> I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)

However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)

Even on Windows they are losing despite the invasive anticheats.

I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.

The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.

The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.

Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.

It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.

Who exactly is "Linux"? What entity, specifically, would work on kernel anti-cheat? The only realistic company who would care about this is Valve. So really you should say Valve, not Linux.

That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.

The anticheats themselves typically do support Linux, it's the devs that don't choose to use them

they have the tools they need to defeat cheaters, they just choose to go about it in very invasive and lazy ways because people still buy their product.

then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.

Plenty of competitive multiplayer games run on Linux fwiw.

> 748 can run on Steam Assuming you mean on Linux?

How old is your GPU/does it/the driver support async shader compilation? I've turned off shader pre-comp like two years ago because of this bug, never had any problems/lags with any games.

I play OW2 on Linux with Steam + Proton and I was having this issue a while back but somehow fixed it. I think it was by increasing the shader cache size! Happy to find the exact instructions that I did to fix it once I’m back on that PC.

The frustrating thing is that it's very difficult to figure out why a game is crashing unless you run Steam from a terminal. The logs are hard to find otherwise - at least if you're using the Flatpak version of Steam.

I also settled on CachyOS after distrohopping a few times in the past month. I had Brave at first but it doesn’t play well with shutting down on any Linux distro IME so I switched to LibreFox, but I might switch back and simply deal with the Brave issues instead because everything else feels better using Chromium-based.

I thought the auto-complete in that shell they use was neat, but I made a typo and it kept autocompleting that typo and I’m about to do the same as you lol.

I’m having wifi issues with my setup for some reason when it’s perfectly fine in Windows, so I need to diagnose that or switch back to windows until I build a new PC with a more Linux-friendly hardware.

> That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists

I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.

Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.

But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to recommend anything else for the average Windows gamer/prosumer but first-time Linux user.

- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.

- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.

- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.

- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.

The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.

I was about to comment that SteamOS is based on Arch, but after looking at the actual graphs, they've got SteamOS as its own separate category.

I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?

* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.

Weirdly enough, if someone with the latest generation hardware wants a distro that mostly works out of the box, Arch will be the safest choice.

Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.

It might help that Arch has an absurdly good wiki.

I think if it does come from SteamOS, but indirectly. When you have pieces in place selecting distro becomes simpler. Even if it not actual SteamOS.

I would guess that having easy access to more recent kernels (including -zen) a and gpu firmware is a big draw for arch.

After arch got an installer much of the initial barrier went away

Steam Deck runs Arch.

+1, now using Bazzite as my main OS in general and for gaming, and only use the dualbooted Windows on a separate SSD when I have to play a game which contains a rootkit. There've been two of those, and I can live without them. Rotate games quite frequently, mostly just works.

I think if you like checking it out and customizing the settings of your OS, then try it out! Or at least look up the games you care about on ProtonDB.

Even encrypted the Bazzite SSD just out of paranoia caused by Windows. Even partner-proof so far.

Only ever used Nvidia so far, probably going to switch to AMD in 1-2 years, as I hear that they're better on Linux.

It’s fantastic! Truly enjoy using my machine now.

The average Linux gamer is likely to have a very different setup to the average Linux user in general. It's a subset of a subset.

Arch is rolling release and bleeding edge.

This helps a LOT with games, especially new ones needing the latest drivers or hardware support.

Coming from being a Windows power user for decades, Mint just felt like more of a natural shift for my daily driving than Ubuntu. I wonder if that's a common opinion or if there's another driver.

The survey only shows Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS and Ubuntu Core 22 for 8.25% vs Mint's 22.1 and 22.2 at 9.21%. There's a whole 18.04% hiding in the "Other" category that I suspect contains a lot of other Ubuntu interim and older LTS releases.

That would explain the recent move to rewrite things in Rust on Ubuntu, they need the marketing to grow their user base.

Steam Deck is Arch-based, that's most likely why.

I wonder how much Omarchy (based on Arch) made a dent... DHH said that it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

Are you saying that windows users are supposed get the steam hardware once a month?

I’ve had steam installed on (and more/less used daily on) probably 4-5 different windows installs since roughly 2016, and I’ve never seen it more than once a year.

There is a somewhat famous post about this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_hav...

Essentially stating that Linux users disproportionately care to actually report bugs they encounter rather than ignoring them. I find that very plausible.

I like the idea of Linux-native games but I've honestly never gotten it to work. Not on Ubuntu, not on Fedora, not on NixOS. The Steam Runtime is supposed to remove the distro from the equation - but, again, I've never seen it work. Proton is the sane target.

I never update ANYTHING on my Linux system without a very good reason. The strike rate of updates causing damage to my system and costing me hours of debugging is not worth it.

What games do you play? I really wonder about experiences like these since they differ so much to my own. The only time I mess with linux-specific things like proton versions is if a newly purchased game doesn't launch with the default proton for some reason. It's annoying, sure, but pretty rare nowadays and I usually anticipate it by checking protondb before buying a game rather than after, and it's not like it's much effort to change the version to experimental or hotfix or add a launch option. Only a handful of games have required anything more complicated like using protontricks to get extra dlls (something I've had to do on Windows for various games anyway) or the GloriousEggroll proton fork, which are easy to install with my distro's package manager. But once it's setup and working, either out of the box or after some tweaks, I don't have to mess with it ever again. I still have one game using Proton 5.0-10 from 2020 that I still play occasionally. (Current stable version is 9.0-4 from last December.) No need to change it if it's not broken.

I game a lot so there's other stuff I'll do like tweak the actual game settings to get visual/performance/control qualities I want, or use steamtinkerlaunch as a way to more easily install mods, or let my distro update my nvidia drivers (which I've found more stable than AMD's in the past on linux, but I use the proprietary ones) but that's all normal gamer stuff regardless of OS.

Dare I suggest you use NixOS, or even better, https://github.com/Jovian-Experiments/Jovian-NixOS, so you

1) get a working setup in minutes by following just https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Jovian_NixOS;

2) if something does not work, you don't start from scratch next time you have an urge to try again;

3) have best-in-class community support;

4) overcome lack of apps by plugging into nixpkgs - the biggest repo of packages out there among all the distros.

Hope I did well on selling NixOS to you.

nvidia 4080 here. I dont have any issues on Pop OS!. Drivers install and update just fine. Games just work. Bazzite is another popular gaming OS.

My steam library is like 120 games with several pretty popular ones. Again, no issues outside of anti-cheat but I'll uninstall those games so i dont care.

nvidia's drivers have gotten a lot better and their support docs are pretty decent. i had a mild issue a few months ago getting ollama running properly. All i had to do was update the nvidia toolkit, worked fine after that.